Tom Friedman compels me to defend some parts of the Republican Party:

The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions.

It seems unlikely that the GOP can be “captive” to all of these factions at the same time if they are all in conflict with one another. That’s rather like saying that the Democratic Party is “captive” to corporations, labor unions, and environmental groups in equal measure, but that can’t be. While it’s true that the Republican Party is generally lacking in imaginative or even relevant policy remedies for many current problems, the different factions Friedman lists here are mostly not responsible for this.

Friedman identifies “huge debt and entitlement obligations” as one of the challenges. While I have my problems with the odd theory that running on entitlement reform in an election year is a winning strategy, Friedman has to acknowledge that most of the recent discussion of significant entitlement reform has been taking place inside the GOP. I find it difficult to take seriously protestations about fiscal responsibility from many of the same people who created a huge unfunded liability just nine years ago, but Ryan and Daniels have been making arguments for entitlement reform for the last year, and Sen. Coburn has been advancing proposals that include cuts to military spending and tax reform. Friedman writes as if none of this had ever happened. It’s true that military spending cuts and tax reform will have to be part of any solution, but incredibly Friedman manages to overlook Republican hawks’ absolute opposition to any meaningful cuts in military spending. This faction presents one of the biggest obstacles to a deal involving substantial entitlement reform, and in Friedman’s telling they might as well not exist.

Most of Friedman’s other complaints involve re-defining “centrist” policies as the truly “conservative” ones, and then demanding why there aren’t more Republicans offering “centrist” proposals that Friedman likes. In short, Friedman’s vision of an acceptable “second party” looks remarkably similar to the third party he has been imagining for some time as the vehicle for his preferred agenda. Small wonder that there aren’t many Republicans rushing to embrace it.